The Musica speculativa of Jean des Murs played a key role in renewing interest in the teaching of Boethius in the fourteenth century. We argue that this treatise is much more than a summary of the Boethian De institutione musica in presenting its core teachings as fully consistent within an Aristotelian theory of knowledge. Two versions of its prologue (1323 and 1325 respectively) are examined together with their relationship to Jean’s Notitia artis musicae (1321) and the innovative significance of its mathematical-style presentation of the teaching of Boethius about proportions with its appeal to clear diagrams. We aim to guide the modern reader through the thought patterns and diagrams of Jean des Murs, demonstrating why the Musica speculativa was so widely studied in the later Middle Ages. The two different prologues are presented in English translation for the first time.

Placing amateur performers and their instrument of choice at the forefront of inquiry, this article makes a case for the Spanish guitar as an instrument through which knowing subjects sought an epistemology of musical practice, a way-of-knowing-and-doing that could even surpass other musical epistemologies already in circulation during the seventeenth century. Leading this investigation is a handwritten book of lessons wherein there emerges a preference for learning the violin using the principles of guitar playing. Next, I discuss the appearance of annotated guitar tablature in the copy of Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche held in the Library of Congress, which edits Caccini’s songs to purpose their accompaniments for easier guitar playing. Together, these two documents reveal earnest attempts at being musical with a guitar in the hands or guitar playing in the mind, opening us to a world-view that hinges on the guitar as the locus of musical knowledge.

Douai, Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, MS 1105/3 fragment 74.4/1 is a musical fragment from the second half of the fourteenth century, composed of two bifolios copied in black mensural notation. It not only contains a concordance for Multipliciter amando, a motet that, until now, has only survived in the famous Chantilly manuscript, but also four unica (another complete motet, two incomplete ones and a three-voice Gloria). After presenting a codicological overview of the fragment, I analyse distinctive features of each of the three complete pieces, based on the first modern transcription of the source. Special attention is given to the motet Ferre solet, which, by way of literary encoding mechanisms, reveals its composer’s name (Frater Johannes Vavassoris) and its precise date of composition (1373), making these four folios a crucial witness for understanding fourteenth-century musical culture.

Horace (65–8 BC), the great lyric poet of the Augustan Age in Rome, composed over a hundred Odes. Scholarly understanding of their early medieval reception has been hampered by the insistence of classical philologists that he was a purely literary poet. Ancient sources and Horace’s own writings demonstrate that he was a performing artist who sang to the accompaniment of his lyre. His use of Alcaic, Sapphic and Asclepiad metres has musical implications. In manuscripts from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, forty-eight passages from the Odes are accompanied by musical notation. The Montpellier codex has notation for the Ode to Phyllis (Odes 4.11) which relates to Guido d’Arezzo’s ‘ut-re-mi’ mnemonic. The St Petersburg codex has settings which suggest various uses, in the schoolroom, abbey entertainments and goliardic performance. The surviving manuscripts were widely spread across Europe and supported a monastic and secular tradition of Horatian song.

In their songs, trouvères referred to their own acts of composition in various ways, not least as ‘finding’ (trouver) or ‘dividing’ (partir). Both terms had a wide and varied usage in medieval French culture and carried meanings that shape the way that the melodic structure of trouvère songs might be analysed. Invention, and its sister art of memory, played a key role in rhetorical practices. The process of ‘finding’ a melody and adorning it with memorable musical figures is performed in the structure of some songs. Division was used for intellectual work, as found in the classificatory models of medieval encyclopedic works, but it also signified socio-political animosity and strife. Through close readings of text–music relationships in four jeux-partis, the cultural significance of the musical acts of invention and division in thirteenth-century Arras is assessed in order to explore why trouvères performed acts of invention and division through their songs.

In 1984 Noel O’Regan demonstrated that Roman manuscripts containing Lasso’s motets were reworkings of motets found in published editions. This article reopens an investigation of the Roman manuscript motet books in the light of an autograph booklet by the Oratorian priest and censor of music Giovanni Giovenale Ancina (1599). This document contains two lists of motets, comprising a wide selection that reflects a search for variety in the number of voices (with a preponderance of eight-voice motets), age and style of the motet. It shows a large number of concordances with several manuscript anthologies related to the Oratorian circles. Ancina’s bookletallows us to propose new attributions for motets by Zoilo and Prospero Santini, better known as a chapel master. Finally, a comparison with existing sets of music books qualifies the multiple authorship of the motet in the Roman erudite milieu of that time.